UNPACKING THE STORY BOX
by IULIA ANGHELESCU
words as breath—
words as the smell of the mouth after a lifefeast; after the ingurgitation of language, tradition, rhetoric-already-made; after the unraveled experiences of daily life and timeless life; words as an expiration…
we speak, we read, we write accordingly. each with his personal baggage, as if always traveling.
and we travel with words as we travel with skin:
utterly superficial and outrageously significant—
as it is, words undo us as much as they shape us;
they are the skin of our social interactions, and at the same time, the licking-link to the Other-- that is, the limit of filled interactions. or so is the prejudice;
and if we think of it, truly, there is nothing more dead that a monument.
so, the Story Box, that alive monument, that tremendous paradox, was a miracle.
yet, it is undeniable that we are creatures of tongue, and we perpetuate life that way—
… language is no different from saliva: it lubricates;
and so was the Story Box an infidel mouth;
speaking like a dispersion, speaking words in no particular altar, speaking for no ears, no objective of a brain-kiss, no known lips, no face, no nation; only speaking to the alien with alien words, like the first kiss of two kids.
joining and not dispersing was the all idea, though. but what a more superb bridge to the un-understandable Other than pouring absolutely the beauty of diversity?
… thus was the Story Box an island in the middle of Neukoln;
an anomaly in the heart of an exception;
a bubble of social and ethnic winds in a bubble of social and ethnic air;
a plane crashed against no sky and no earth;
a speaking cloud;
an alien from nowhere else.
a rhetoric nonsense. a palpable gibberish; the only key to desire.
thus I read Romanian, thus I spoke human, thus I meant further—
no-one understood my words, nor the chorography of them (I did ask in a palpable language). yet, I could sense through the loose cotton-curtain the trembling of heartbeats.
… it is the undeniable proximity of Otherness that lifted the souls of those curious minds, I thought; it is the deniable proximity of logic that broke;
and why that?
because the sublime mystery of the language-kaleidoscope striped its lips to fountain its beauty; the beauty of diversity; the beauty of not knowing; the beauty of penetration with your brain zipped—
the Story Box,
that insomniac excavation of Babel’s ruins--